Q 01/05

Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, grew up on a farm in which country?

A) England

B) Scotland

C) Ireland

D) Wales

Answer · why

B) Scotland

Scotland. Fleming left the family farm in Ayrshire for London at 13 and spent four years as a shipping clerk before a scholarship took him to St Mary'...

Q 02/05

The mould Penicillium, which gave penicillin its name, is itself named after the Latin for which tool?

A) A paintbrush

B) A comb

C) A fishing net

D) A needle

Answer · why

A) A paintbrush

A paintbrush: under the microscope the mould's spore-bearing stalks fan out like bristles. The same Latin word, penicillus, also gave English 'pencil'...

Q 03/05

Penicillins belong to which class of antibiotics, named for a ring in their structure?

A) Macrolides

B) Tetracyclines

C) Beta-lactams

D) Aminoglycosides

Answer · why

C) Beta-lactams

Beta-lactams. The four-atom ring is both the drug's warhead and its weak point: bacteria that make enzymes able to snap it open shrug the drug off, an...

Q 04/05

Fleming first saw penicillin at work in 1928 on a plate left out during what?

A) A night shift

B) A bout of influenza

C) A laboratory move

D) A summer holiday

Answer · why

D) A summer holiday

A summer holiday. The plate was never incubated, so a stray mould, probably drifting up from a laboratory on the floor below, grew alongside the bacte...

Q 05/05

Fleming said he named penicillin on the same lines as which older drug?

A) Morphine

B) Quinine

C) Aspirin

D) Digitalin

Answer · why

D) Digitalin

Digitalin, from the foxglove genus Digitalis. Fleming told his Nobel audience he had simply followed that pattern with the mould Penicillium; his 1929...